Set in 1930s Chicago, but filmed in every borough in New York, The Bride! unfolds in a gritty world of gangsters, scientific ambition and social upheaval. The story follows a reanimated woman and Frankenstein’s monster as they spark a chaotic, outlaw romance across the city. The film stars Jessie Buckley as the Bride and Christian Bale as the monster. They are joined by Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard in key supporting roles.
Few stories in cinematic history have cast as long, or as unsettling, a shadow as Frankenstein's Monster. Born from the fevered imagination of Mary Shelley and reanimated across generations of film, the Frankenstein saga has always existed in the liminal space between life and afterlife, beauty and the grotesque. Its world flickers with electricity, shadowy laboratories and moral ambiguity.
In The Bride!, that eerie inheritance is blown to full proportion. The film’s environments feel alien, and invented but intimately lived-in, a paradox that production designer Karen Murphy embraces. Her sets oscillate between the avant-garde and the human, constructing a visual language that is emotionally fierce and aesthetically daring.
For Annette Bening, the actor who plays Dr. Euphronious, her influence on the sets is critical. The doctor is a key character whose world, particularly her laboratory and office, anchors much of the film’s visual and emotional atmosphere. Her performance ties closely to the production design, as her character’s spaces reflect a life of intellect, travel and experimentation. “They’re so specific and imaginative and wondrous and beautiful, yet very real,” she says of Murphy’s environments. That sense of reality is not accidental. Even the smallest details, like the soft, evocative wall colour in Euphronious’ office, aptly named “Heavenly Peace” is intimate. Bening was so taken with it, she recreated the shade in her own home. Traditionally, Frankenstein narratives center on male genius and the consequences of playing God. Here, with figures like Dr. Euphronious (played by Annette Bening), the intellectual and creative force is no longer exclusively male. The film expands authorship, of life and of knowledge to include women.
Murphy’s approach hinges on layering: history, character and material culture all coexist within a single frame. Nowhere is this more evident than in Dr. Euphronious’ world. Her laboratory, constructed onstage at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, merges early modernist ideals with scientific authenticity. Drawing inspiration from the radical transparency of the Maison de Verre in Paris, Murphy envisioned a space that feels experimental and traditional. Period machinery; dentist drills, exercise bikes and electrified instruments sourced from a private archive populate the set, lending credibility to the film’s exploration of early electrical science.
In contrast, Euphronious’ office offers warmth and psychological depth. Filmed inside Alder Manor, a stately early 20th-century mansion in Yonkers, the space reveals a life richly lived. Sculptures line the bookcases, objects gathered from travels across continents and shelves brim with books that suggest decades of intellectual exchange. “You can feel the conversations that have happened there,” Bening notes. It’s a room that invites you in, layered, personal and unmistakably alive. In Mary Shelley’s story, The Bride of Frankenstein, and especially in later film adaptations, the Bride is created for a man, defined by him and ultimately destroyed when she refuses him. This new version flips that premise. Instead of existing as a passive object of desire, the Bride becomes a subject: a woman in charge of her own consciousness, body and autonomy in a world that didn’t expect her to have any.
Across the film, Murphy and director Maggie Gyllenhaal map a journey through spaces that feel both geographically expansive and emotionally precise. Shooting spanned nearly every borough of New York City, from a neoclassical Salvation Army theatre on West 14th Street to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, with additional sequences captured in Newark, New Jersey. For the film’s more transient moments, the production turned to diners in Brooklyn and quiet, weathered corners of upstate New York; motels, roadside stops and train tracks that carry a distinct American in-between.
But it’s in the film’s most heightened environments that Murphy’s vision becomes comes alive. The ballroom, for instance, is a deliberate rupture. Inspired by the opulence of Art Deco master Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann and the grandeur of Palace of Versailles, the space is intentionally oversized and lavish to the point of excess. “It needed to feel very distinct from a setting you’d think to see The Bride and Frank in,” Murphy explains. The result is a world of polished surfaces and social choreography, a place where the protagonists appear almost alien, their dislocated presence mocking the glamour of the environment around them.
Equally transformative is the underground club, hidden within a crumbling Newark department store dating back to 1858. Here, Murphy shifts registers entirely. The space is chaotic and alive with texture: fabrics draped without symmetry, eclectic furniture gathered without hierarchy, walls marked by spontaneous acts of art. Conceived as a sanctuary for society’s fringes, the club becomes a site of liberation. “It was meant to represent underground subculture,” Murphy says, “where everyone brings their texture.”
Throughout The Bride!, Murphy resists the temptation to let spectacle eclipse the story. Even at its most stylised, the design remains faithful to its characters. It’s a world where electricity still crackles through vintage machines, where grandeur is alienating and where echoes of lives half-lived still haunt rooms, or maybe its the whirring of something being brought back to life.
